Taylor Swift's Red album tops the Billboard 200 chart with first-week sales of a whopping 1.208 million copies in the U.S. alone. Billboard reports this is the highest weekly sales number in more than a decade (since 2002's The Eminem Show), and earns Taylor a new page in the history books as the only female artist -- and the fourth artist ever -- to hit the one million first-week figure twice since SoundScan began tracking actual sales in 1991.Red
is Taylor's second consecutive million-plus album selling debut and third
chart-topping album.Red sold more than the rest of the albums in the Top
50 combined.The pressure is certainly off with sales figures like Taylor's, but
it was never really an issue for the superstar, who tells us that he biggest
concern was only with making her fans happy. ["I think, for me, the
pressure would come if I didn't feel like the fans liked what I was doing, if I
didn't feel they were into the news songs we're releasing ahead of time. Like,
we put out all these songs before the record comes out to see which ones they
like the best, to give them a sampling, and it seems like they're really loving
these songs, so I'm getting a good vibe, I'm getting a good feeling that
they're gonna like the record, and to me, the most pressure comes from 'Are the
fans gonna like this? Is this gonna sustain them for the next two years? Are
these gonna be the songs that they want to play in their car?' And as long as
I've got those bases covered the pressure doesn't feel so bad."] Here
are some other Red stats:The CD set a new worldwide iTunes record for
highest ever first-week album sales, with 565,545 copies sold digitally around
the globe. Red reached Number One on the iTunes sales charts in 42
countries, and reached Number One on the national sales charts in the UK, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Ireland, Argentina, New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia, among others. Red also breaks iTunes's first-week U.S. sales record, with more than 464,000
albums sold. At Target, Red set the retailer's new one-week sales record
with more than 396,000 CD sold -- Taylor's Speak Now album previously held
their record. Red claims the best one week sales total for any country
release in SoundScan history, surpassing the 1.08 million copies sold of Garth
Brooks' Double Live in 1998.